Great article from Cindy Bristow on pitch calling

Just had to share this article from Cindy Bristow at Softball Excellence. It’s about the four biggest mistakes you can make when calling pitches. Cindy really hits the nail on the head! No surprise there – she’s brilliant. And very realistic when it comes to the subtleties of coaching fastpitch softball. I have certainly seen […]

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The one that really stands out to me is the mistake of having "no REAL Knowledge of Your Pitcher." There is nothing more discouraging to a pitcher who pitches for a coach that doesn't seem at all interested in understanding what pitches she is most comfortable with and where she likes to throw them. It sort of makes the pitcher feel as if she's competing against the opposing teams batters AND HER OWN COACH, at least the one calling the pitches. Often times the solution is just a smidgen of humility on the coach's end--drop the ego a bit and really communicate with the pitcher rather than just dictate. This is necessary if you REALLY want to get the best out of her. Too often the pitch has someone who is least familiar to her pitching calling her pitches. What a miserable setup for the pitcher! Sadly, many of those who call the pitches just don't care about this.

Bristow's last sentence is a great ending-- "Turn your pitch-calling focus onto the pitcher and away from yourself and you’ll have gone a long way in helping your pitcher throw her best game!" Impossible for some, but not all.

Ken Krause said:

Just had to share this article from Cindy Bristow at Softball Excellence. It’s about the four biggest mistakes you can make when calling pitches. Cindy really hits the nail on the head! No surprise there – she’s brilliant. And very realistic when it comes to the subtleties of coaching fastpitch softball. I have certainly seen […]

More...

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Unfortunately, she neglects to mention a fifth, and IMO the biggest mistake - not teaching catchers how to call the game! A good catcher is more in tune with the pitcher on a day-to-day, inning-by-inning basis than anyone on the bench can ever be and therefore can more effectively call pitches to the pitcher's strengths rather than focusing only on the batters' weaknesses, which is another of the major mistakes Bristow identifies (and the principle advantage that calling from the bench has). An old school mentality relic......sigh.

The only good point she touches on is not falling into a pattern. You can't beat random; pitch calling is not a skill. Hitting is timing pitching is disrupting that timing.

Baseball analytics has already shown this. Not sure why fastpitch coaches are slow to come around.

GunnerShotgun said:

The only good point she touches on is not falling into a pattern. You can't beat random; pitch calling is not a skill. Hitting is timing pitching is disrupting that timing.

Baseball analytics has already shown this. Not sure why fastpitch coaches are slow to come around.

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Unpredictable doesn't equate to random. There are plenty of MLB teams heavily invested in analytics, yet how many employ a random pitch calling approach? Why do you think that might be?!

GunnerShotgun said:

The only good point she touches on is not falling into a pattern. You can't beat random; pitch calling is not a skill. Hitting is timing pitching is disrupting that timing.

Baseball analytics has already shown this. Not sure why fastpitch coaches are slow to come around.

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Don't be silly.

Doug and GM, I think those two points go hand-in-hand. I agree catchers have the best view of what's actually working THAT DAY for a pitcher. Coaches have to be willing to teach the strategy and then step aside.

To me, that's especially true in travel ball where you won't have enough data on opposing hitters to be statistically valid. In travel ball you could be playing a new set of teams every weekend. So you're basically just guessing from the bench anyway. If someone's going to guess, makes more sense for the person with the best view of the pitches and how they're working, not to mention what the umpire is calling.

You also have to be willing to walk away from strategy "rules" and adjust to what's happening. A screwball might be the right call in a situation by the book, but if it's not happening today you need to call something else. The object of the game is to win. Coaches need to be sure they're putting their entire team in the best position to do that. To me, calling pitches that aren't working, or getting called by the blue, is like having your slow-footed team constantly trying to steal bases because you like to be aggressive on the basepaths.

Greenmonsters said:

Unpredictable doesn't equate to random. There are plenty of MLB teams heavily invested in analytics, yet how many employ a random pitch calling approach? Why do you think that might be?!

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If pitch calling is a skill which MLB catchers are the best at it? Are they better than random chance?

I do believe that a pitching philosophy can be effective (pitching outside to a batter with a defensive shift).

Was Yadier Molina a great signal caller or was it Dave Duncan's philosophy of keeping the ball low to induce ground balls?

GunnerShotgun said:

If pitch calling is a skill which MLB catchers are the best at it? Are they better than random chance?

I do believe that a pitching philosophy can be effective (pitching outside to a batter with a defensive shift).

Was Yadier Molina a great signal caller or was it Dave Duncan's philosophy of keeping the ball low to induce ground balls?

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Of course a good catcher is better than random choice. Random choice doesn't take into account anything that could give an advantage to the pitcher or the hitter. Who teaches pitchers to throw to random targets? What hitter swings at random locations. I sincerely can't understand where you're coming from. There is nothing random about pitching, unless you're just drawing pitches out of a hat like some kind of raffle type strategy. I don't get it?

Glad you brought up Yadi. It's commonly accepted that he's the best pitch caller and handler of pitchers around. The amount of time he spends studying hitters, getting to know his own pitchers, etc., is well documented. Surely you can't believe he puts that work in just to increase randomness. To increase unpredictability for the hitter, yes, but that isn't the same as being random, as GM noted earlier here.

(BTW, Dunc was an absolute master, but he retired 4 years ago. Lilliquest has made an adjustment or two to the pitching philosophy since then, including going for the strikeout with a high fastball when the situation warrants, which Dunc almost never did.)

Pitchers don't have random skill, and hitters don't either. (Actually, when my DD was just learning to pitch at age 10, she was pretty random. But it didn't help her much.)

Knowing a hitter's weak spot is a factor, especially if your pitcher's strength plays to it. You use it against the hitter. Things can be different game to game, and at bat to at bat. The variables are too numerous to mention. And that doesn't even begin to cover the head games that go on that aren't related directly to skill. It's even better, I think, if the hitter knows he can't hit a pitcher's fastball - he's already at a mental disadvantage. The pitcher would be crazy NOT to feature the fastball and give the hitter a better chance at the plate.

The higher the level of play, the bigger the percentage of the game is played out between the battery and the hitter. Even defensive alignments are related to the pitching strategy. At the highest levels, I'd go as far as to say 80% or more of the game is between the pitcher and the batter. You can't afford for that much of the game to be left to random chance.

My friend, nothing is random in a ball game, especially between the circle and the plate. Well, maybe the umpire's strike zone. But that's a matter for a different thread.